Back in fifth grade, there was this really beautiful girl in my class. She had long, wavy hair, glimmering black eyes, thick eyebrows, and thin lips. She defined beautiful for me. Every day, I found reasons just so I could look at her, sometimes I ended up staring at her. I was always in awe of her magnificence. I grew up wanting to look like her because she is really beautiful. Almost flawless effortlessly.
Then came high school, I was again head over heels silently admiring another beautiful girl. She had a silky, blonde, straight hair, flawless milky ski,n and an almost perfect curvy body I know I needed to have. She embodied what was beautiful for me at that time. And as time passed by, my standards was set higher and higher. It constantly evolved into something unachievable.
When I stepped into college, I was overwhelmed with so MANY beautiful girls. I walked along the halls of the university and I would see them and I would look at myself in the mirror and find my own confidence fading until it ceased to exist. However, beyond all the beautiful faces, I became friends with this one girl. She isn’t at all tall, isn’t the “perfect” model size, she’s physically attractive though, but more than those superficial traits, I was enamored by her personality, charm, intelligence and perspectives – all of which I found beautiful.
Nowadays, you get on Facebook and see tons of beautiful girls posting the almost perfect selfies and you look at yourself and say, “I want to look beautiful too. I want to look like her.”
And if Facebook isn’t enough, you scroll down Instagram and your feed is filled with gorgeous two-piece pictures posted by some random girl you don’t even know yet you’re following her, with your sanity at the edge of the cliff because she’s your ultimate body peg. Then you tell yourself, “Maybe if I can trim down my carb intake I can look like her,” or, “Perhaps If I don’t eat much, I’ll get her body,” or, “Maybe if I workout more I’d be just like her.”
All these thoughts, circling around your head every single time you see “those” kinds of girls. Well, you know what? You don’t need to look like them or be like them to be beautiful.
There is ultimately more to who you are than your facial features and body size.
In a society where we get pressured to look like the cover girl of a famous magazine and attain the body size of supermodels, where we get pressured to look like the “girls” whom the society referred to as “beautiful” — it is in no surprise that girls are filled with insecurities and desires to be “beautiful”. When in fact, they’re already beautiful just the way they are.
But this is exactly what our society made us believe, to hate on our bodies, to let photoshopped images on magazines, to define our beauty standards and to continually consume products sold in markets in order for girls to finally be what they should be, a shallow empty image of a perfect girl.
Some even went as far as the “Golden Ratio” to measure beauty. Having an approximately 1:1.618 ratio, apparently the perfect to measure human proportions. Like the width of the forehead, the cheeks, the nose, the lips – in which all should conform to one other to produce a facial structure that is pleasing to the eyes of many.
Yes, it’s okay to aim to beautify yourself but not to the extent that you will start to do harsh moves just to fit inside the society’s standard of beautiful. YOU ARE NOT WHAT THEY LABEL YOU. Girls today should not let these standards define them but rather defy the society’s beauty expectations.
We need to start raising a positive generation that will love their looks and sizes genuinely. We need to start de-emphasizing the importance we put on looks and sizes and start emphasizing the need to look beyond faces and figures and start APPRECIATING truly the insides MORE than the outsides.
We have to erase the kinds of conversation that only push the idea that it’s all about how they look rather than what they’re made of.
Instead we need to persuade girls to know that who they are enhances their beauty, that they have to OWN who they are. After all, beauty is confidence. As long as you’re confident with regards to who you are inside and out, you can rock as much as anyone else. Regardless of your body size, you can ramp a sexy black dress as much as they can. Regardless of how you look, you can own a red lipstick as much as they can.
As cliché as it sounds, we have to start encouraging girls that they are indeed beautiful no matter what. No matter how they look, no matter what their body size because being beautiful is MORE than looks and sizes. Your charm, your wit and your attitude contributes to it. How you see life, how you see yourself, how you fight, how you overcome, it contributes. The way you laugh, the way you carry yourself, the way you embrace your flaws – that contributes as well. Being beautiful is not just having the unruly hair, the flawless face, the perfectly toned body shape. It’s more than that. REAL beauty is measured on who you are in your entirety.
I encourage everyone to stop this kind of discrimination, that because you’re not the model size, you’re not beautiful. That because you don’t have the perfect face, then you’re ugly. NO. At the end of the day, looks and sizes will fade. It will deteriorate. All of us will eventually grow old. But who you are will not, it will always remain and it will always be remembered. 
